Magnus Sicilian | BRILLIANT ROMANTIC FUN! 🐐♟️🤩
sicilian #magnus #brilliant #knightsac
The immediate former World Chess Champion, GM Magnus Carlsen, is quite possibly the GOAT (greatest of all time) of chess! So, I was very interested to discover on analysis in this game that I had stumbled upon an anti-Sicilian line given his namesake, the Magnus Sicilian!
Just like the game in my last article and video, I had the white pieces, and my opponent played the Pirc Defense (1. e4 d6). Rather than taking the full centre with (2. d4), I decided to develop my queen’s knight (2. Nc3) – Black will encounter this rather less frequently (only 8% of the time according to the Lichess community database) compared to d4 (44%) and Nf3 (29%), and it fits thematically with my preference for the Vienna Game. For instance, analysing my opponent’s (@Jakhan56) games while writing this article on OpeningTree.com, I discovered that they’d played a bit over 1000 games of the Pirc Defense as Black – their single most frequent named opening with the Black pieces. However, of those 1000 games, they’d only seen (2. Nc3) 43 times and had won less than half of those games!
Black surprised me here with (2… c5), transposing the game into a Closed Sicilian Defense; positionally it is equivalent to (1. e4 c5 2. Nc3 d6). Against the Sicilian Defense, I’ve been playing the Smith-Morra Gambit (see 22 videos in my playlist!). However, this was no longer available to me as I’d already developed the queen’s knight… I thought very briefly about entering the Grand Prix Attack with (3. f4), but then decided to try a move on the spur of the moment that didn’t seem obviously bad, (3. d4)! And this has been labelled, at least by the chess.com analytic engine and on chess social media, as the Magnus Sicilian!
A historical note:
There wasn’t that much information about it, but it seems that Carlsen has played this line as an anti-Sicilian approach in serious competition. In the LumbrasGigabase, I found the following three games of Carlsen playing the Magnus Sicilian (PGN download):
- 1-0: GM Magnus Carlsen — GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek, 2018, 5th Vugar Gashimov Memorial 2018 (Shamkir, Azerbaijan)
- 1-0: GM Magnus Carlsen — GM Ian Nepomniachtchi, 2022, Super United Croatia Blitz 2022 (Zagreb, Croatia)
- ½-½: GM Magnus Carlsen — GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, 2022, Super United Croatia Rapid 2022 (Zagreb, Croatia)
Carlsen, of course, was not the first person to play this line though it does not seem to have been played by any of the historical masters. The first person to play this line for a win was German FM Dr Hans-Joachim Hofstetter in 1987 (Hofstetter — Wilde, 1987, Unterfranken).
The logic to the Magnus Sicilian is that it cracks open the centre and moves the game down lines that don’t look very Sicilian-ish. The basic idea is that after (3… cxd4 4. Qxd4 Nc6), White moves the queen back to d2 (5. Qd2). Black has several reasonable moves, but White’s approach is simple – to fianchetto the queen’s bishop and then castle queenside.
In my game, Black must have felt a bit unnerved and chose to refrain from capturing my d-pawn and instead played (3… b6), a mistake. It’s interesting reflecting now on the game – at the time I had a sense of dissonance, an intuition that this was a mistake by Black, but what the mistake was hadn’t quite crystallised in my mind. Rather than sit on the position too long, I developed my other knight. Stockfish called this a mistake, but only because of the missed opportunity.
As I looked at the position longer, it clicked – Black’s pyramid of pawns on the queenside dark squares resulted in a weakness in the light squares on that side! I develop my light square bishop to take advantage of this weakness, but this was inaccurate. It was the right idea but the wrong execution! The simple, direct, and best way to take advantage of Black’s weakness was dxc5, to open the d-file for my queen, and then Qd5 with an attack on Black’s exposed a8-rook. Instead, I saw a twisty path for my light square bishop to go to the same d5 square! 😂
Black tries to defend with aggressive counterattacks (6… cxd4? 7. Qxd4 e5), hoping to win tempo or to turn the lost rook into a trade. However, after their (7… e5) which attacks my queen, I saw the tactical rudiments of a devastating attack and spent a couple of minutes calculating it out! The d-file was semi-opened (so the queens could potentially “look” at each other) and my light square bishop had vision not only on Black’s a8-rook, but also Black’s weak f7-pawn! There was a potential “bishop deflects king from queen” tactic available, as per page 24 of my book, “50+2 Chess Quick Wins: Tactical ideas for exciting chess for beginner players”! And the attack begins with a brilliant knight sacrifice (8. Nxe5!!).
As the knight with my d5-bishop threatens the f7-pawn, the natural looking response by Black is to take the knight, and my opponent spent around 5 seconds deciding to do so (8… dxe5), possibly mystified why I sacrificed the piece! However, I now had (9. Bxf7+), a check revealing the fully open d-file and an attack on Black’s queen! Black has two legal moves both of which results in the loss of their queen! If Black captures the checking bishop, the king is deflected from the defence of his queen (9… Kxf7 10. Qxd8). If Black attempts to bongcloud their king and holding the defence, the queen’s doom is still inevitable as White’s dark square bishop leaps into the fray and skewers the king to the queen (9… Ke7 10. Bg5+ Kxf7 11. Qxd8)!
I was really chuffed that I found this winning tactic, but the game wasn’t over yet! Black was a good sport and opted to play on. With my queen deep in Black’s territory, surrounded by their pieces, the very important thing I had to ensure was to not get my queen trapped! I considered simply pulling my queen all the way back down the d-file, but finally decided that my queen was temporarily safe. Indeed, with my queen on the back rank, it effectively pinned two of Black’s pieces (the b8-knight and the f8-bishop) to their rooks. Tactically, a queen by herself cannot give checkmate, which meant my approach was simple – bring additional pieces into the attack and chase Black’s king to win material or mate!
This works very well, though I did miss two very nice mates – a [+M1] on turn 15, and a [+M2] on turn 18 – I probably need to do some checkmate puzzles! Nonetheless, with each loss of a piece, Black suffers another psychological blow and after losing a rook without compensation on move 19, the emotional damage was too much, and Black resigned. Good game, GG!
The big takeaway from this game is to be on the lookout for tactical patterns that support a big attack, especially when your opponent treads off the beaten path. Also, consider giving the Magnus Sicilian a try!
